Wireless Watch

Ericsson and BT start to make the commercial case for network slicing

Network slicing is a crucial concept in the 5G landscape; indeed, for many operators it will be the best way to justify 5G investment at all. Yet it has remained a vision of vendor labs and international R&D projects, and very little attempt has been made to assess its economic potential. So while BT and Ericsson have a sharp axe to grind in this area, they have at least offered some financial analysis in their new report on the subject, claiming slicing could boost operator revenues by over one-third compared to non-sliced environments. The concept is that a service or individual will be allocated a virtualized slice of network capacity, fully optimized for its particular needs. In a virtualized, software-driven…